Entropy and the Idea of God(s): A Philosophical Approach to Religion as a Complex Adaptive System

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this manuscript and provide detailed feedback, and I appreciate you taking the time to point out the typos I missed. I also appreciate you pointing out Coltea’s Complexifying Religion, which was incredibly helpful for shoring up the empirical data I’m drawing upon from systems theory to make the argument. It seems as Coltea and I have reached similar insights from two different starting points, sociology and philosophy, respectively. While Coltea’s analysis did not present any challenges to my core argument, I have since revised the argument light of reading his study so that it my philosophical approach employs a portion of his contribution (e.g. Distinguishing the signal vs noise in information perceived by psychic systems; allopoiesis and its relationship to autopoiesis, etc.), and to show a historical progression in systems theory of religion from Luhmann, to Pace, to Purzycki and Sosis, to Coltea, with my efforts attempting a synthesis to more completely explain the way psychic-social system communication leads to religious systems as complex and adaptive. I believe these better addresses the first three “can be improved” marks, providing better context in relation to previous theory, methods and approaches, and bolstering the argument. Pertaining to the last point, and concerning the feedback you provided, I read your feed back as understanding my argument to be proposing a more essentialist, and perhaps rationalist (e.g. need; necessary) position than I intended. While I don’t get into the epistemological weeds of constructive empiricism – I’ll save that for a later paper – I am intending to propose a nominalist, rather than realist understanding of both religion, and the significance of meaning as adaptive. While I do employ the language of the “anentropic” to signal to the individual a dimension of experience that is somehow unconstrained by the second law, this is discerned in and through one’s intuition exercising a selection dynamic on information, with the “survival” of the intuition in sustained communication resulting in the emergence and stability of a religious system over time. So, I’ve changed most references to the antropic to function more as an adjective, “intuition of the anentropic dimension of meaning,” rather than as a noun, “intuition of the anentropic” to hopefully avoid what I read as an essentialist interpretation of the argument. Now, it is possible I misunderstood your position, and so if issues around “necessary” remain, please do clarify so I can address it.

REVISIONS TO ABSRACT

The first four comments/suggestions you provided applied to conceptual issues in the abstract, which I have substantially revised to address these isues: I have modified the abstract to reflect the language of complex adaptive systems, contextualized the observation about “becoming differently religious” to the latter half of the twentieth century, better situated the analysis in relation to the persistence of religion as a CAS explanation rather than a definition (to your point in preferring “explanation,” I agree that the use of “definition” is perhaps too rigid for what I am trying to accomplish in providing a “baseline” narrative for explaining religion, in which other definitions may apply in a system of explanation), and I removed the “forever in search for” language to reduce the perceptions of necessity or western bias.

Revised Abstract:

While a universal definition of religion eludes the field of religious studies, it certainty seems that people are becoming differently religious rather than a-religious, especially since least since the latter half of the twentieth century. To explain the enduring relevance of religion in human experience, this article expands on recent evolutionary and sociological research in systems theory of religion and develops a philosophical approach to understanding religion as a complex adaptive system. Frameworks of meaning and beliefs communicated by religious systems emerge and adapt in relation to interpretive selection pressures communicated by individuals-in-community relative to entropy’s role in one’s contingent experience as a “teleodynamic self” in the arrow of time. Religious systems serve an entropy-reducing function in the minds of individuals, philosophically speaking, because their sign and symbol systems communicate an “anentropic” dimension to meaning that prevents uncertainty ad infinitum (e.g. maximum Shannon entropy) concerning matters of existential concern for phenomenological systems, i.e. persons. Religious systems will continue to evolve, and new religious movements will spontaneously emerge, as individuals find new ways to communicate their intuition of this anentropic dimension of meaning in relation to their experience of contingency in the arrow of time.

REVISIONS TO THE BODY OF THE PAPER:

Comment 5. The paper says, “My effort here is to begin to apply systems theory to philosophy of religion…” (90-1). If one is a philosopher and one applies systems theory to religion, one has not applied it to philosophy of religion.

EDIT: I can see how this causes confusion, so I changed it to (line 198-200):

·      My effort here is to begin to apply systems theory philosophically to better understand those “internal forces” hinted at by Pace that drive religious communication (2011, 226).

Eventually, I think systems theory can help refine philosophy of religion in a way that avoids the Eurocentric and Abrahamic-tradition focus of its analysis of religious phenomena, such as the idea of God as omniscient, omnipotent, etc., and I hint at what I mean by this when I say in 610-14 that concepts like omniscience and omnipotence are adaptive insights, rather than necessary qualities of that to which the anentropic dimension of meaning ultimately refers. However, to really make my point about “applying systems theory to philosophy of religion,” would require a wider analysis of evolutionary epistemology and constructive empiricism than I present here, and so I’ll save that for a later article.

Comment 6.       The offers “a philosophical approach to defining religion” (211-2). Perhaps this sentence only bothered me because of the opening sentence of the paper’s abstract said that there was no definition of religion. But perhaps “defining” here does not mean giving a defintion for a term but instead “explaining” and “specifying the function of”?

EDIT: changed to “explaining” (line 212-3). I agree that a “definition” fixes the phenomenon, where an “explanation” may be perceived as more mailable to a reader, and reflects the more nominalist, revisability inherent in a systems theory approach to explaining psycho-social phenomena.

Comment 7.       The paper states that “Entropy is not a cause here, but rather a property, a measurement of a system state” (240-1). However, some properties are causal properties, and so the distinction was not clear to me. In addition, “a measurement of a system state” seems to be an appositive for the term “property,” but those terms do not seem equivalent. Is the red property of an apple “a measurement of the apple’s system state”?

EDIT: Deleted. This sentence stemmed from my efforts to ensure I demonstrate an accurate understanding of entropy and systems science, even though I am trained in the humanities. Since this causes confusion, and since much of the “defending” of the role of information entropy in religion I thought I’d have to do is accomplished by Coltea’s study, I’ve just omitted it so I don’t unnecessarily open myself up to a criticism of misunderstanding.   

That being said: from what I understand, entropy is not a cause, but energy and information, with increases and decreases of entropy being a post-hoc description of the relationship between the two in a given system, i.e. a measurement of the energy-information relationship at Time 1 vs at Time 2, by some sort of observation distinguishing system from environment. However, to your question about the redness of the apple, I tend to agree with the epistemology of constructive empiricism of Bas van Fraassen, so I would say that the “property” of the redness of the apple is discerned emergently, as produced from the dynamic of the observation of the human eye relative to light hitting an object. After all, What does the redness look like to a bat who uses echolocation instead of sight? Or where is our awareness of the property during eight hours of dreamless sleep, where memory cannot even recall a mental representation? Again, I locate myself on the empiricist/nominalist camp rather than the rationalist camp, so I am perfectly happy to understand “redness” as a linguistic construct that stabilizes over time, and is predicated to instances where experience similarly conforms, rather than as a noumenal property inherent in the thing. So, when I get to the relationship between “phenomenological system” and “person,” the former should be understood as an empirical tautology, given the way experience presents itself according to a manifold proceeding according to the arrow of time, and the latter is the assertion that given makes of itself, asserting the significance of its self-referential autopoiesis as “I,” constructed in and through a relationship with a “we.”  

Comment 8.     The paper states, “Masson’s work in applying cognitive linguistics to theological language shows how the processes of tectonic equivalence and double-scope blending reduce epistemic uncertainty” (lines 400-1). The terms “tectonic equivalence” and “double-scope blending” are not explained and are not mentioned previously or again. This is one of several examples of the jargon that I mentioned above. 

EDIT: I changed these two technical terms to the more general “metaphor and symbolism,” of which they are both a species, for easier understanding and to avoid more instances of a jargon-heavy paper.

·      Masson’s work in applying cognitive linguistics to theological language shows how the use of metaphor- and symbol-building processes in our cognition reduce epistemic uncertainty by producing “new, often unanticipated, meanings” to make sense of two or more often conflicting inputs (2014, 102).

Comment 9.       The “need” in the statement that “we need to distinguish religious meaning from other forms of meaning to identify what is religious about communication…” (lines 487-8) sounds like an empty tautology to me. (In fact, I had this thought often when the paper claimed that something was “necessary.”)

EDIT: In addition to reducing language indicating necessity as I mentioned in the introduction above, I changed this sentence to avoid the tautology, hopefully. Coltea’s study helped me clarify what I mean by needing to distinguish religiously relevant information in communication vs religiously non-relevant information (Lines 578-595):

·      However, we need to distinguish that dimension to meaning that qualifies as “religious” in the social systems that allow them to operate as an “expert system,” speaking to the existential concerns of individuals-in-community relative to what we would describe as non-religious systems operating in society (see Pace 2011, 225). Otherwise, all communication would be considered religious, which would mean the concept is unhelpful for explaining what we mean by religion, and the phenomenon should instead be reduced to explanations offered by other disciplines like cognitive science, sociobiology, anthropology, or economics. Using Coltea’s insight that religion is a “complexity reducing technology” that sifts through the noise of information to isolate the signal of meaning in communication (2023, 13-14), we can say philosophically that the religious dimension of meaning in communication is perceived by the phenomenological system when it distinguishes the anentropic character of a signal indicating canonical information as distinct from the “noise” of entropically-applicable indexical information. By anentropic I mean “not subject to entropy,” rather than negentropic, or “entropy reducing.” Indeed, Coltea shows how meaningful information communicated by the religious system reduces entropy (uncertainty) and so contributes to the adaptive predictability of the psychic system, by why that information would be considered meaningful at the level of human experience requires a philosophical approach.

Comment 10.   The paper says that the idea of God or gods “must be unconditioned” (line 505). I did not follow this argument, given that many gods are understood to exist in a conditioned way: they are said to have parents, and they have their own particular concerns, distractions, and fears. Sometimes, gods are even killed. Similarly, many spirits are not understood apophatically (line 521). This paragraph felt me as if a western-trained philosopher was trying to shoehorn cultural diversity into their preferred account.  

EDIT: This is a fair criticism, and I anticipated your final sentence, but clearly I didn’t state my position clearly if it is coming off as claiming that the anentropic is the referent of belief must be described only in anentropic terms. I too would agree that would be starting with the axial-age, and particularly western, conceptions of ultimate reality, and would end up subordinating a localized indigenous tradition’s understanding of their Gods interacting with them to a what those God’s really are – references to a that which is ultimately anentropic. As I indicate, recognizing such anentropic descriptors may be the easiest way to recognize the presence of the anentropic dimension of meaning in human communication, but that is a secondary application of the concept than what I intend. I have revised the paragraph accordingly, and hopefully I better clarified my position to address the important concerns you raised (see lines 596-626):

·      What is perceived when communication is understood to contain “religious” meaning is the abstract representation of the interpenetrating dynamic of the allopoiesis of meaning constituting the community-of-individuals and the individual-in-community, depending on one’s starting point in communication (cf. Pace 2011, 221). The referent grounding this interpretation is intuited to be in some way unconditioned by the very conditions set on experience that drives the need to secure for experience such an unconditioned referent. Otherwise, there would be no meaning, but rather uncertainty “all the way down,” resulting in persistent anxiety. This is not to say that the theory requires the symbolism of a religious system delivered through the building blocks, such as supernatural agents, must exhibit only anentropic characteristics to be considered the building blocks of meaning. This would betray a western bias in religious thinking that understands divine agency to necessitate anentropic ontology, and therefore the existence of some sort of ultimate reality “beyond” the world in order to explain the existence of the world and the source of meaning. As we see in the various myths of oral and written traditions, however, the category of supernatural agents are often described as subject to the demands of the second law, and not always supernatural. Hence, the anentropic characteristics of omnipotence and omniscience, describing idea of God in western philosophy of religion, is itself a symbolic development in the evolutionary epistemology of phenomenological systems communicating their intuition of the anentropic over time in those geographic regions of the world we describe as “western.” What I mean by the intuition of the anentropic dimension of meaning is not the character of the referent itself – i.e. intuiting a being that is ”everlasting” as a necessary condition, but the way communication establishes a conceptual null-set in symbolic cognition which makes possible the interpretation of meaning that grounds our sense of self and social identity beyond the life-span of individual psychic systems interpreting this information. The intuition of the anentropic can be considered the perception of a signal that an individual interprets to be contained in communication, because it ultimately refers to the possibility of continued psycho-social autopoiesis in time (i.e. identity), despite the persistent experience of life in the arrow of time to the contrary. The autopoiesis of our self-reference or social reference is merely the analogical starting point from which this referent is apophatically inferred in the phenomenological encounter of self-referential constancy in arrow of time.

11. I don’t follow what this is saying: “Conceptually, the anentropic is non-essential, and necessarily so” (lines 596-7).

I clarified this point in relation to the second reviewers feedback who asked for a clarification on the predictive limits of the concept (Lines 645-661). What I mean by non-essential is that the anentropic isn’t what is believed in, but rather a descriptor for what beliefs functionally for society and substantively for the individual’s perception of meaning. I think the following clarifies it, but I may have misunderstood the confusion.

·      This affords us the opportunity to compare systems of belief without privileging a cultural conception of the anentropic dimension of meaning – e.g. as omnisicent, omnipotent, etc. – because the anentropic represents an epistemological move to explain why meaning is the output of religion as a complex adaptive system rather than a metaphysical claim that explains that for beliefs to be religious they must refer to the anentropic or negentropic character of “supernatural” agents – though that may be the easiest way to identify the intuition of the anentropic in some religious systems. As an epistemological claim, the intuition of the anentropic dimension of meaning helps distinguish the religious character of communication in general, but it cannot be elucidated beyond its sociological function without the ability to recognize the symbolic representation of that intuition in communication. Religions are adaptive semiotic systems, emergent from adaptive biological systems, and so an “inside-the faith” understanding is required to recognize the articulation of the anentropic dimension of meaning in a social system’s history of symbolic communication. In addition to insights gleaned from cybernetics, sociology, and evolutionary theory, the traditional tools of religious studies and the humanities, such as linguistic, textual, and cultural analysis will remain relevant for an interdisciplinary approach to systems theory of religion.

12.   Does the phrase “cogitating of belief” (line 597-8) mean: believing? Or is the paper shifting to a focus on thinking about the process believing?

I addressed 11 and 10 with the following revision of these sentences:

The latter, not the former, and so I just revised the following section to use “process of believing” because I think that works much better, and just tied it to embodied cognition. Thank you.

·      Nevertheless, our process of believing is rooted in embodied cognition, the inference dynamic underlying the intuition can only draw on data from the entropic condition to formulate its conception of the anentropic dimension of meaning. This is why references to the anentropic are often structured symbolically in terms of anthropomorphically conditioned imagery, because it reflects what we know best: ourselves. Belief is dynamic, everchanging, and is more than a rational-choice calculus. People aren’t religious because they believe in propositions, but because they feel and experience something.

Typos:

1.      The term “compliments” (line 78) should be: complements.

·      Edit: corrected

2.      The term “hyper agency detection” (line 120) should be: hyperactive agency detection.

·      Edit: corrected

3.      The paper is missing commas ate several places, including here: “biting too hard for example” (line 143).

·      Edit: corrected

4.      It was not clear whether the phrases “such agents” and “the agents” (lines 179-80) refer to the ritual participants, or to the appeasement of supernatural agents.

·      Edited: The sentence has been modified to (lines 149-52):

Rituals tend to occur spontaneously when a community is under threat, and that “once such [supernatural] agents become linked to a ritual, desires to please or appease the agents can proximally motivate the ritual performance [of participants]” (Purzycki and Sosis 2022, 151).

5.      The paper cites a paper by Cho and Squier 2022 (line 215) but there is no such paper in the Works Cited.

·      Edited: Thank you for catching this typo that should have been “22,” a page number, not a year. The citation is now: (2013, 22)

6.      The paper uses brackets in this sentence: “In short, [western] science emerged from religion…” (lines 367-8). Brackets are used to add terms to direct quotes. Since this is not a quote, the author can use parentheses (or omit the punctuation altogether).

·      Edited: brackets removed.

7.      The terms “distinction” and “act of distinction” (lines 70, 391) might be clearer as: the act of distinguishing.

·      Edited: changed

8.      The term “telodynamic” (lines 432, 454, 547, 603, and 648) should be: teleodynamic.

·      Edited: corrected.

9.      The phrase “both to preserve the system of dynastic state power, but it also afforded…” (lines 572-3) should be: both to preserve the system of dynastic state power, and to afford…

·      Edited: corrected

10.  I think that “ai” (line 586) should be capitalized

·      Edited: changed to “AI”